


LT Val

by oldbosie



Category: Historical Fiction, Original Work, The Vietnam War - Fandom
Genre: Derogatory Language, Gen, Military Homophobia, Soldiers, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:18:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldbosie/pseuds/oldbosie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Historical fiction set during the Vietnam War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. On Stories

We thought we were finished when we heard the LT had it for a fella. Really. We thought we were going to die—stiff and apoplectic with the discordant wrench of laughter, we thought a local schoolboy could have leapt from the bush nailing bullets through our skulls and we’d have sat there, howling, until capillaries bloomed broken over our foreheads. We thought someone might find, someday, a ring of bodies encircling a dint of ash, what was left of their mutilated mouths and busted teeth torn open in gruesome jubilation.

No such scar fell among the trees, but we’d believe anything of this forest. Stranger scenes had been laid out upon its floor. So it was easy to see Val backed up against a kitchen sink in Iowa, smothered under the mouth of some yellow-haired college boy, frequenting those bars where colored lights punched little holes in the dark to reveal bare skin and coils of smoke. Except it wasn’t like that. It got better.

Everyone missed sex, girls, someone’s tactile lips to stopper your mouth. A lot of us were virgins, but that didn’t matter much. Everyone reacted to the notion with the same sinking feeling, as if crumpled under the weight of longing, paralyzed from the waist down for a moment and seized with anger at what you couldn’t have. Thus in agonizing strains of mock boredom, clustered around our little cigarette burn, we’d find ourselves talking.

What else do you do? Talking, and telling stories that got wilder and more wistful as the fire dimmed and white dust scorched our fingernails, each guy practically drooling on himself as he related the last time he’d held a pair of tits. We’d all gawp at him in this glaze-eyed rapture; we’d change his words in our heads so the half-naked babe who curled her calves around the bedposts and laughed with her eyelashes resembled our girls back home. That, or Marilyn Monroe. The stories were all told alike, though no girl looked the same. They traversed the body. Some started with the hair, the ears and dreamy eyes—others started from bare brown feet and bony ankles. The sentimental guys like Jem and Bard and Booker would describe what her smile felt like, what her eye color meant and how she was like the wind and the sea. The scary ones like Paintball and Twain made it lingering, graphic. The dignified men spoke of the warmth and tenderness. The boys, eager young virgins like the junior McKay, Legs and Sundance, all that mattered to them was how pretty she was. They were the ones who pictured Marilyn’s face on the squirming body of Maxwell’s girl in the firelight.

“You got one, Val?”

“Hm?”

“A _story_.” We smirked at the way Phillip McKay said the word, as if by using it in conjunction with sex we had endowed it with special awe-inspiring magical powers or some shit. The smirking was because we all sort of felt it, that the war had changed the meaning of story. Now, stories were both always true and always not. Just some were truer than others because they were based in fact. Lt. Ben Valerian, soft-spoken, self-assured, with a slender waist and a determined strength, platoon leader—his stories were this kind of true, the kind where you could ask anyone and their version would be comparable to the original on account of something that had actually happened. You knew because they never had to prove it. Val wasn’t one of those guys who said, “ask anyone.”

“Yeah, I have. I’ve got a story.” But there was something reticent about his smile that told us he wouldn’t go on, not without encouragement.

We’d started the storytelling with Cairo, crouched at Val’s left—we were eager to close the circle, finish the thing utterly. Twain said something like c’mon, LT, open it up, and Paintball noted that a looker like Val had to have something worth hearing. We agreed, stiffening with piqued interest, but our fearless leader blushed gently over the glowing coals and prodded them with the toe of his boot.

“You don’t want to hear it.” He should have known better: that nothing could have incensed his boys’ thirst for such a sensational tale, worthy of secrecy, more than those words; that he was now doomed to tell it, even if it meant we had to tie him to a tree. And a number of eyes threatened it, so he cleared his throat and assumed an air of meek indifference. He was holding a bit of gauze to a nasty scrape beneath his ear, gouged out by a chunk of the mine that blew away Buddy Rand that that morning. At least his face—his straight nose, thin lips, colorless eyes—was unharmed, teased Cairo, who was right to say it. Val was beautiful, in the way of Michelangelo’s David, with all the admiration and grace to command hosts of men.

His arm still ached from the tetanus shot. When his mouth opened, even the cicadas hushed their hellish rasp so as to hear him draw breath. And when he told us precisely why we didn’t want to hear his story, the spell was rent asunder—tumultuously. There were low whistles, wolf-whistles, soft curses, loud guffaws, riotous laughter.

“Jeeeeeeeeee-eeeee-sus,” said Paintball in a high-pitched sort of moan, shaking his head in disbelief. “Jeeee-sus.”

“Hey Val, why didn’t you just tell ‘em, when they came to ship you out? Just ‘I’m a fucking faggot’—you’d have got out of here, be sitting at home right now! Be at college, man! Get a _job!_ ”

The lieutenant laughed, somewhat painfully, and murmured,

“Well, exactly.”

“They’re gonna send you home, brother!” howled Cameo’s derisive voice, unheard until now. “Dis-honorable dis-charge! Why didn’t you fucking tell ‘em, huh?”

But half of us raised ourselves a half-inch from our seats and rounded on the wide-eyed grunt.

“Listen, sir,” Paintball threatened. The laughter lulled, every pair of eyes fixed on the meanest, scariest, skinniest motherfucker in the platoon. Cameo was new, and terrified. “The fucking faggot is our LT. We’re keeping out mouths _shut_ ”—Cameo cowered slightly under a bug-eyed glare—“because he’s not _leaving_.”

Appreciative whooping rose from the troops, and we resumed our seats, chuckling and rocking our heads from side to side. It told you how much we loved Val, that the LT didn’t even blush beyond what the firelight could hide, that he remained sitting straight-backed and unabashed in the midst of an outcry that could have made the natives tremble in their cots. He knew we needed him, and when you knew something out there, it was invariably true.

Paintball, mean, scary, skinny, superlative motherfucker, was _afraid_. He was afraid of what losing Val might mean.

So Cameo leaned back in disdainful resentment, narrowing his eyes and saying with the biggest sneer he could muster,

“Well? You gonna tell us your faggot story?”

That was when we thought we were dead men. Because it wasn’t a yellow-haired college boy after all. It was some epicene youth, like Hermes, all long supple limbs and flyaway golden curls, as we had imagines—but that was the point at which all predictions failed. There was no sweaty club, no blaring music, not even a kitchen sink—it was a small-town vicar, not twenty years old and as innocent as the Virgin Mary. Val had been kind of like that, too, not the faintest notion of whatever was love and thus oblivious to the fact that he had found it. The clergyman, delicate Mercury, and Val spent Mondays together in dappled parks and ludicrously floral sitting rooms of this or that stepmother, on college grounds and the verandas of vernal cafés. They did little talking of the Lord; the vicar, it transpired, was more taken with the polytheist pantheons, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu. The symbolism, he said, was more direct, the faith much more difficult to destroy.

In the end, it was a kiss interrupted by the entanglement of fingers in a rosebush, resumed once they had moved indoors to scrub away the threads of sinless blood. So it had been a gaudy porcelain bathroom sink, really, adorned with colored bottles of Val’s mother’s cologne. He showed us the scars on his knuckles, and we smiled. It was a good story in the telling. And a _vicar_ …We laughed until we had to dash tawny, teary mud from out eyes, choking on our C-rations and cigarettes.

“We could have died, Val, dammit!” snorted Jem. Well, he did. Half of us did, before dawn—but it wasn’t Val’s fault.

I promise you, I promise anyone who asks, as long as I’m alive and as sure as I live now. It wasn’t Val’s fault. I’m not going to tell you what happened, not yet. I have to make you understand what it meant to die then, in that most tender of moments, with a rare fair breeze to dispel the septic insects and the softest sensation swelling within us, one of almost true contentment as we rolled our palms along our arms, just to feel the touch of something in the crimson dark.


	2. I am Vietnam

We first kicked underbrush amid oppressive rain, swinging in the wind with the grasses that drank of it, everything green and black and grey. We could hardly see one another. The only thing for it was to kneel against four-cornered walls of fog and gloom. We saw the porous clay dilating as it cooled, its hot red flesh made flaccid by the oily kisses of ill weather; we saw the flares, dull and round as fireflies through the steam. But we saw little else, a condition that agitated the nervous and vexed the smokers. An even eight guys were scratching at their pockets with their chipped-up nails, considering whether or not a cigarette would stay lit if they sheltered the flame with their helmets. McKay the younger tried it, a mistake.

“In weather like this?” Val had hissed, fingers closed around the pack of Camel Straights before the boy could refocus his bleary eyes. “Keep your helmet on.”

But we had no need of helmets that day, unless one of us wanted his hair dry—and most of us didn’t. We were grateful to coax any amount of grit from our scalps in the runoff of overhead foliage. We filled up our canteens and our tanks with the stuff, though we ran no risk of running out; a chopper bloomed from cartoon clouds, a commonplace miracle, to resupply our spam and M&Ms, our water and our ammo, often enough. It simply tasted better. _Look, I am Vietnam,_ we’d say, smacking our lips. _It is me. No really, before you call me crazy—a fella’s what, seventy percent water, right? So if I drink enough of this shit_ …Yeah, we got it. As if any of us had ever been anything but Vietnam.

I dropped with this sucking wet sound into the mud at the bole of a tree, alongside everybody else, sheltered by the thickening canopy. We were crouching on the spit-glazed ground, punctuated with grimy pocked stones that recalled the dinted marbles of our hometown alley tournaments, the twelve-year-old’s currency. When the rain began to ease, we had our fire kits ready, and the smokers gasped in the glory of their tainted deliverance. The fog consumed the fumes, as it were—and the stink, the sweet, smoldering stench, was lost in the visceral squalor of the jungle. To think that even a nose better acquainted with this place could pick out the satin thread of cigarette smoke, with all the petrol and napalm smeared heavy through the topsoil, the pigs and cows and general _death,_ was laughable. In the respective grips of the acrid chemical and the malodorous organic, I struck my own match. Bard had two cigarettes lit at once, Christ knew why, and wasn’t bothering with smoking them in turns. From time to time, he nudged the twin candles into Cairo’s hand. The latter leaned against the crook of Bard’s abraded arm, dragging immoderately at the fragrant cloud between them. And when the cigarettes returned to Bard, he did the same, puffing both at once—in a world of reason, I would have smirked into my knee at the futility of it. But what practice here, in hell’s eternal summer, purgatory’s grey and green, was anything but futile?

“Well, it isn’t _wasteful_ ,” Cairo murmured. “Two grunts, two cigs. Makes all kinds of mathematical sense.”

Bard merely drew his fingers through his hair, letting it stand dark disheveled from its roots, and fiddled with his folded sleeves to ease them from the roughened flesh beneath. He was a nervous kid, with an abundance of both misplaced conceit and misguided inhibitions. He had that elder-child bravado, perhaps, in moments of relative calm; and when he looked at Cairo, he looked at him with big-brother eyes, with somber responsibility. But he was less than brave, and less than sound himself. Cairo was far more audacious.

“But you don’t eat right,” Bard would say to him, when the cans popped open and half the gasoline green beans were tipped from Cairo’s hand. “You’ll waste away, all pale and frail and flimsy. It’ll get you before the VC do.”

“Shut it, man. I do what I want here. If you don’t do what you want here, you’re a fucking dumbass lifer. I don’t like the green beans, I don’t eat the fucking green beans.”

Clearly, Cairo had something against being a fucking dumbass lifer. His contempt was wholly defensible, and it was a contempt we all nurtured. We were sandbags, tiles exhumed from the quarries of our pastoral towns, our skyscraper cities, to spit blood into this yawning excavation. We built walls with our warm bodies, we piled up and lay deferent; and when we fell, we fell like each of us a load of bricks. The lifers didn’t see the grid of russet blocks, stacked to shield the liege lords of commerce and country—they didn’t see that every brick was just alike, nor that the shades and textures did not differentiate their purposes. They saw only the barrier, and fancied themselves perched heroically upon it. To the other bricks, the ones who’d been boxed up and shipped off without consent, it was the lowest form of inanity. If you thought you were a special case, born and bred to defend liberty and justice—if you thought you were indispensable, or virtuous, or right—you were indeed a fucking dumbass. And with that came a pigheaded obedience, a self-righteous conformity. That was what terrorized Cairo. He did what he wanted here.

Sundance was tucking things into the band of his helmet. A handful of photographs fanned at his feet, alongside an array of leaves, playing cards, bullet shells, a feather or two. He would fit each one into place, squint at it, frown, and remove it again, discarding it among the rest. We saw him later with a massive flower sprawling from the dinted brim—he had waded through the nearest marsh to retrieve a hardy purple bloom like a mutated lilac floret, some foreign water-loving plant. The LT had been quite shaken upon learning of absence of our RTO, and vexed at the excuse.

“Do you have any idea—? For God’s sake, you do, you know what could have happened! Wandering into a marsh for a forsaken _flower…_ ”

But the next time we moved through the water, turbid with virescent glares and amphibious, grasping fronds, we saw him pluck from its thick stem the same pale purple blossom, rolling it between his fingers until it curled into despondent pulp. The idle whim of a free hand, to keep it from trailing through the mire, perhaps—but we smiled to see it nonetheless.

“He’s plain _cute_ sometimes, that poor fella,” was Booker’s aside to me. “It’s almost sad, know? He’s _sentimental._ ”

I shrugged.

“Aren’t we all?” I thought of the younger ones, fresh out of high school, their pockets stuffed with what little they had of their mothers, their kid brothers and girlfriends and baseball championships. Booker was pursing his lips, shaking his head.

“Hell no. These kids, they carry that shit ‘cause they’re selfish. They want it all _back_. They _miss_ it. Nah, they stomp the sentiment out of us when we’re all the sorry FNG. Do all they can to make sure we don’t remember a line of poetry besides _bury me with a Russian cunt_.” I laughed, noting that their efforts had been wasted on Bard.

“Well, yeah,” he conceded, “but Bard had a year of college. And there’s them that miss the memo, keep all sorts of feelings and tenderness inside until it eats ‘em up, one way or another. It’ll happen here. When this place spits those bastards out, there’ll be nothing inside—they’ll have been rotted away by what they feel.”

When Vietnam spit a bastard out, it was just one way of killing him. Other ways included wasting him, hiding him, flattening him, dusting him, swallowing him. They all meant the same thing: that his hapless heart stopped beating, and that his flesh was likely somehow wrecked, ripped open or pocked with fever, anemic and sallow, dust-reddened, jaundiced, black and blue. Our guys never seemed to go out the color they went in.

Shrouded in their murky tarps, for the rain had resumed out of pure malice, Cairo and Bard were playing word games.

 

“Limpid.”

“Clear?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Nacreous,” Bard said, smacking water from his parched and brittle lips.

“Fucking what?”

“Na-cre-ous.”

Cairo sighed.

“Pearly.”

“Yep.”

“Duchenne.”

“No clue.”

“It’s this certain kind of smile—the kind where it’s not just your mouth but your eyes, your eyes smiling too…”

I listened to them from the far side of a vine-braced tree trunk and tried to sleep, the rain thrumming on my forehead, pooling in my lashes. Sundance was off searching for a marsh flower. Booker and Jem were playing snap with soggy laminate cards. Phillip McKay had given his kid brother his watery M-unit can and was satisfying himself with B-unit cocoa powder, rolling a clotted mouthful on his tongue and holding it there as long as he could bear. The guy had a sweet tooth, nothing uncommon among us mud-dwelling, fetor-sucking grunts, but he had enough restraint to refrain from pinching his medical M&M’s. Those were for shock only, hard times, bad, bad wounds.

Paintball was pressed up next to me, along with Twain and Cameo. We were identically posed, like dolls with wire spines, knees beneath our chins and ponchos drawn about our throats. None of us would sleep, not really—none of us ever seemed to. There was always something either happening or poised to happen, even though the dull and tedious trepidation of the poised-to-happen hours seemed a vast majority. Our minds were clouded with the what-if mentality. This was how craziness started.

“Did you all ever hear the story of Deolali?” asked Paintball, spluttering slightly through the downpour. We shook our heads.

“This army camp the Brits had in India. They filled it up with sanitariums and psych wards because all these soldiers went crazy. Fuckin’ _barking_. It’s where the word ‘doolally’ comes from. And these were guys, lucky sonnabitches, who’d finished up their tour of duty, and were just waiting for the ships to come round and take ‘em home. Said they just went crazy _waiting_. Because it was _boring_. Not a care in the world and these fuckers just lose their shit. I mean look at this mess—burn, slash, sniff, wait, kill, bang, hide, wait—all insides on the outside, all bug-eyes and tranquilizers just waiting but waiting through deep _shit,_ you know? We’re _better_ than them English pussies.”

Twain was laughing. Cameo didn’t seem to believe it all, or understand some of it; I was busy praying that Paintball was right.


	3. On laughter, belief, and kids

We lost Maxwell that night. It had continued to rain, and our bodies folded down somehow, ducking beneath the weight of all that water, all that thunderous infinity above and behind us, pushing at our throats. We quarried bunkers in the mobile earth, and bracing silt against our shoulders tried to lessen the grip of consciousness upon us, tried to doze. I was with Maxwell—and Maxwell was talented at this. Big, he was big—the burly machine gunner, with supremely old-fashioned habits and something like high-functioning narcolepsy. When he wanted to be out, he was out. And in our slurry dugout, coiling and hissing uneasily as snakes around us, I was kept awake against his shoulder by the time-honored grumbles of a snoring soldier. Crooked uncomfortably between Maxwell’s massive side and the half-wall, so loose and wet it cupped my forehead with a viscid slapping sound, I tried to concentrate on the faded blue aperture in the corner of my eye, playing the self-depriving sentinel. But all the time I kept slipping, becoming Bard or Booker or Twain, filling their skins and calculating vaguely what each of us was doing; who was sleeping, who was dozing, who was dreaming. Who was trembling in his mud-hole cradle, unable to blink or think of anything but that vigilant wanderer in black silks, waiting for the fire his mythic hand would spell from the humid blue to…I don’t know, _take things away_. Because if you don’t have a real sense of mortality you can’t be afraid of what will kill you. You fear the loss of your buddies, maybe—the loss of limb, the onset of pain so distant on fancy’s horizon that it’s something unreal until it begins. You fear the scream you think might tear at a nearby throat.

Wrenching myself from Maxwell’s side I made an attempt at a cigarette, but the apoplectic gasp of flame was recurrently extinguished, choked and faded—and with appropriate exasperation I rolled the paper hopelessly between my lips.

Something whistled in the dark. I thought of the vigilant wanderer, somebody’s son, raised in a warm restless place with this rain and this phoenix landscape which every moment exhaled the onset of a fresher, greener life.

 _Let the mortaring,_ hummed my young grey mind with an almost vespine boredom, _begin._

Awareness returned with Val’s face, with his arms blossoming from his ears, his cramped and desperate efforts to haul us from our holes. We were fine, he sighed, we were all fine, once I emerged with my hands full of silt. Maxwell was quick behind me.

The blue was easing with the rain. Somewhere behind the clouds the sun was thinking about it. But while the night held on for dear life, thickened our ears with the ring of stillness opened like a wrist, the big guy started up with an inarticulate revelation. A sort of coughing glottal stop, like the hesitation before a word of recognition—but Maxwell realized nothing. His eyes stopped registering things, suspending the customary click-click with which we process all we see and feigning contemplation; and though he moved still, unmarked by wounds, we knew he was gone. We shrugged. It happened. And yet, we wondered why.

Damn, we said to each other in our heads. Thought ol’ Maxwell had more in him, we imagined ourselves observing regretfully. Usually it takes more than a casualty-free mortar blast to shake a fella out of his skull.

But the significant glances were no more than gossamer ephemera, unfolding with the dawn only to be comminuted by time’s quick decay—we were the mantle of mayfly dust left clinging to autumn’s fatigued leaves, we were the last grey scintilla of a long-dead star in a fraction of a second. Because we knew—some flexuous excess of tissue tucked discreetly in our heads had glimmered with the thrill of realization, before it came to light—some part of us knew we had seen it too. And then we saw it with our eyes, not our fraught old intuitions.

“Whoa,” said Bard in his incognizant young voice, with his open young throat and big-brother hands so idly trembling. “Shit.”

Cairo drew up close behind him, shoulder fading into Bard’s olive drab but gaze fixed, inexplicably, upon me. Or, at least, part of me. His face was eclipsed as if by the umbra of the earth across the moon as it turned, a distrait demilune, half away from my eyes and half angled at another feature, a feature more recently hewn upon the surface of my skin.

“Can’t you feel that?”

Fear, actual fear benumbed my lips, furnishing them with less an inquiry and more a gelid murmur.

“What?” I asked, a whistle in my windpipe. Cairo blinked at me.

“He can’t, he can’t hardly feel that—”

“Hell, he ain’t hurt!”

“ _Fuck,_ look at it, though!”

“I _said,_ he ain’t hurt!”

My hand disengaged, stung goldenrod red, from a harrowed sort of accident in my side. Devoid of all feeling, sure—but lacerated into me like a fresh-tilled acre, a trinity of wide ruddy furrows on my waist.

“I didn’t even get hit, we didn’t even—”

And yet the blood had risen and was pressing through whatever pale wrappings still clung to my bones. The first repulsed shudder gripped me, and with it Phil McKay the medic’s steadying hand; but the pain did not come. I waited for it, a stalwart, a believer—oh, I was a great believer in pain—and with every moment’s delay the unease mounted in my chest. Doc’s palm slipped up beneath my A-shirt, analytically, deftly. I felt his wedding ring slide cold against my skin. I couldn’t feel the quarry, the volcanic fault, the disinterred entrails that were supposed to be killing me—but I could feel the circlet of fair nickel alloy curled around his skin, rolling over mine. This convinced me of his sincerity; I believed him, then.

“You’re not hurt.”

I wrenched my eyes toward the sucking wound splayed beneath the rungs of my ribcage, studying it with muddied fingertips.

“I know, man. I know.”

I wasn’t hurt. It was the weirdest fucking thing. Weird, what a moment’s pre-packaged, pre-sterilized, corn-syrup-and-benzaldehyde belief, all hissing and spitting like something alive in its cellophane wrappings, could do. It could make you bleed. It could make the medic strip you down and patch you up when there was no hole to be propped against a thimble, probed with a darning needle. But it let you feel that boy’s wedding ring slide cold against your skin. Some pretty, pretty girl he knocked up in the 12th grade. He had a photo of a pretty, pretty baby in his breast pocket.

Phil McKay’s kid brother laughed himself silly for five months and a day. He started laughing—a sun-blistered, robust football captain, with his endearingly brindled face struck off into a shapely white smile, shaking—like any punk-ass high school junior who ever heard of his big brother doing a broad and getting saddled with her unexpected offspring. And he kept laughing, too, until the kid was born. Legend fucking has it that last day young Ewan McKay laughed straight, he saw the baby and fell in love with it. He just ogled right into those vacant blue-black eyes, in the middle of a puffed-up baked-potato-type pink face, and split his chiseled jaw smiling. Now he tacked little asshole notes onto Phillip’s letters home, grinned at that picture of pretty auburn mama fondling pretty black-haired baby for the camera, nuzzled his chin over big brother’s shoulder for a look. It made me sadder than fucking anything else, anything. I couldn’t tell you why.

But feeling that wedding ring on my uninjured side reminded me of the truth. Things that were real, and sweet, and pretty-pretty and somehow sadder than anything else. That wasn’t belief. That was life. Some things are more present than the things you believe, I thought, straggling out through the others with red mud caked on my boots.

Emasculating as it might have been to say it, framed between the gleaming trophy cases and the checked tiles of our old school gymnasiums, we understood Ewan’s enthusiasm for his pretty little nephew’s featureless, vacuous face. Our auditoria were vaulted blue instances of sky, lenses shrouded in cataracts of dust; our spires were burnt black colonnades, our cathedrals narrow trenches of vermiculated clay, creased and ruddy as necrotic skin. We had no shame in cooing like some barren auntie over Polaroids of toddlers. Sure, we were ashamed when one of us couldn’t bring himself to kill a twelve-year-old baby-san after raping her black and blue—ashamed when our buddies had to mow her down like no big deal, bullet in the brainpan, and take her ears and drop her severed half-breast into your hand, warm as if in life fresh from the zenith of the ribcage. That was shame for us. But we loved kids, the real tiny ones, who’d hop in eager circles round our ankles and ask us for candy, say “GI No. 1” until we turned into M&M machines, dispensing Technicolor concessions into their curled avian hands like each of us was his own ice cream truck. We heaved them into our arms in thatched bars and called them dúa bé, which as far as we could reckon meant something like “kiddo” in Vietnamese. We weren’t sure, because when we said it the natives laughed at us with an air of mock indulgence.

Kids sometimes burst in our faces, tangling the window-hangings with their lungs. The toddling Vietnamese and the 20-year-old Americans alike.

Then there was that kid Fergus, who we all wished would just go and get killed but who’d learned Gaelic verse from his IRA unit and taken care of himself and his baby sister in fucking Boston from the age of eighteen. Everyone liked him, his gap-toothed smile and freckle-starred face, but it didn’t stop us wanting him killed. You did some math, and you got when he’d first held a gun, when he’d first wasted a man, a woman, a child. You got like eleven, like twelve years old. Maybe nine. It made him a saint out here, and it made him an enemy.

He burst in our faces, too. He tangled the hanging trees with parachute cord and burst like Judas on his field. We never saw it coming. We had called him Finn McCool, and he had laughed. We never saw it coming.

Althier, a temperate young malcontent with shadow-eyes and a certain inscrutability of manner, laughed once as Paintball tended the marks of four mama-san fingernails. These marks were made of bloody nonbeing, splayed across a swollen cheek with such venomous precision that we almost wished we hadn’t shot the withered woman dead for fear of being haunted. This was when we were in the field, and we wrecked each other worse than we wrecked the VC. I knew some guy whose nose was shot clean off in a scuffle for a jackknife, opening him up a third black eye in between the burned and blistered apertures that twinned his cheeks. He got to keep the knife, but he also got to experience firsthand the delights of a slow and painful death beneath the combined forces of ballistic trauma to the frontal lobe and gradual asphyxiation due to blood accumulation in the lungs. The kid was an asshole; he wore a plastic peace sign on a pleated hemp bracelet. Another day, when Althier so justifiably laughed at Paintball’s face, he got a marking of his own. Paintball plucked a searing mess skillet from atop a tower of Sterno, filling our tin cups with clay-colored haricot beans, and hauled it by the handle into the offender’s forehead. A scorched, concussed, slightly less shadow-eyed and slightly more edible Althier emerged with something like a cross, a wrathful deletion, crowding the crumpled socket wherein once lay a lovely black iris. I held the guy’s wrists to let Mr. McKay remove what was left of the eye. Sundance raised him up in the middle of a firefight and prised the semi-automatic from his backwards hands, hauling a boy with a blank half-stare through blinking muzzles and managing to make it. Pretty kid came to his senses soon enough, was fine save significant complications in the areas of depth perception and winking at girls. Val was not, as his failure to send Althier to the rear would have indicated, entirely unaware of the necessarily poor judgment involved in keeping a cycloptic minor on the field—he was merely rather more amused at Paintball’s alternative suggestion. The sniper’s post was thence dually occupied, and some form of reconciliation attained. Althier’s aim had improved, and Paintball liked huffing cocoa powder out of its foil while providing instructional abuse.

“Strictly outside regulations,” said Val, but laughed himself.


End file.
